About the speaker

Jordan Weisman has been the driving creative force behind many tabletop and video game companies at which he invented several gaming genres and created some of the most loved and longest running game franchises including BattleTech/MechWarrior, Shadowrun, and Crimson Skies.

Jordan founded his first company FASA in 1980 to publish pen and paper roleplaying games, board games, and novels. He pioneered publicly accessible virtual reality at his second company Virtual World Entertainment which he sold to the Disney family in 1992. Weisman founded FASA Interactive to develop his properties for PC and sold that company to Microsoft in 1998. As Creative Director for Microsoft Entertainment he oversaw the first two years of Xbox titles including Halo. While at Microsoft Jordan conceived and pioneered the transmedia experience for the Steven Spielberg’s A.I. Artificial Intelligence, spawning the new genre of Alternate Reality Games. Leaving Microsoft Jordan returned to tabletop games founding Wizkids to create the genre of collectible miniature games with Mageknight and HeroClix. Wizkids was acquired by Topps Inc in 2003, the same year that he founded 42 Entertainment to produce ARGs, At 42 Jordan oversaw the creation of “I Love Bees,” “Year Zero,” and the “Why So Serious?” campaign for The Dark Knight. Most recently Jordan founded software studio Harebrained Schemes with Mitch Gitelman where he has been reinventing Shadowrun and BattleTech as modern computer games.

Weisman is a New York Times bestselling fiction author, winner of the Northwest E&Y Entrepreneur of the Year award, Time Magazine’s Ten Best Ideas, winner dozens of design award, and has been inducted into the Academy of Adventure Gaming Art & Design Hall of Fame.

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Read somewhere that you attended the USMMA.edu - any truth to that?
Big fan of your works. Glad you are able to keep going.
The future is in the PC / Game Console and all of the exciting technology it brings to our homes!